But now, take the most of us: suppose us not to have been kept carefully from evil, nor led on steadily in good; suppose us to have reached boyhood with bad dispositions, ready for the first temptation, with habits of good uncultivated; suppose us to have no great horror of a lie, when it can serve our turn; with much love of pleasure, and little love of our duty; with much, selfishness, and little or no thought of God: suppose such an one, so sadly altered from a state of baptismal purity, to be saying his prayers as he had been taught to say them, and saying them sometimes with a thought of their meaning and a wish that God would hear them. But does God hear them? I ask of your own consciences, whether you have had any sense that he has heard you? whether death and judgment, Christ and Christ's service, have become more real to you after such prayers? If not, then is it not manifest, that you have sought God, and have not found him; that you have called upon him and he has not heard? You know by experience, that you are not as those true children who are ever with him, who listen to catch the lightest whisper of his Spirit, for whom, he, too, vouchsafes to bless the faintest breathing of their prayer. Or, again, in trying to turn from evil to good, have you ever found your resolutions give way, the ground which you had gained slide from under your feet, till you fell back again to what you were at the beginning? Has this ever happened to us? If it has, then in that case, also, we sought God, but failed to find him; the victory was not yours, but the enemy's; the Spirit of Christ did not help you so as to conquer. Take another case yet again. Has it ever happened to any of you, to have done a mischief to yourselves which you could not undo? It need not be one of the very highest kind; but has it ever happened, that, by neglect, you have lost ground in the society in which you are placed, which you cannot recover; that your contemporaries have gained an advance upon you, while you have not time left to overtake them? Does it ever happen that, from neglecting some particular element of learning in its proper season, and other things claiming your attention afterwards, you go on with a disadvantage, which you would fain remove, but cannot? Does it, in short, ever happen to any, that his complete success here is become impossible; that whatever prospects of another kind may be open to him elsewhere, yet that he cannot now be numbered amongst those who have turned the particular advantages here afforded them to that end which they might and ought to have done?